In One Person

don’t want to go down that road with me—there was a time when
you
wanted something, Mary,” Muriel warned her.
    “Girls, girls,” said Grandpa Harry.
    “Oh, shut up—you old cross-dresser!” my mother said to Grandpa Harry.
    “Maybe I could just stare at
one
of the breasts,” I suggested.
    “Not that
you
care about
either
of them, Billy!” my mom shouted.
    I was getting a lot of shouts and sighs from my mother that spring; when I’d announced my plans to go to Europe with Tom Atkins for the summer, I got both the sigh and the shout. (First the sigh, of course, which was swiftly followed by: “Tom Atkins—that
fairy!”)
    “Ladies, ladies,” Nils Borkman was saying. “This is a
forward
young man, Mr. Archie Kramer—he asks Alma, ‘What’s there to do in this town after dark?’ That’s pretty
forward
, isn’t it?”
    “Ah, yes,” Grandpa Harry jumped in, “and there’s a stage direction about Alma—
‘she gathers confidence before the awkwardness of his youth
’—and there’s another one, when Alma ‘
leans back and looks at him under half-closed lids, perhaps a little suggestively
.’ I think Alma is kind of
encouragin
this young fella to look at her breasts!”
    “There can be only one director, Daddy,” my mother told Grandpa Harry.
    “I don’t do ‘suggestively’—I don’t
encourage
anyone to look at my breasts,” Muriel said to Nils Borkman.
    “You’re so full of shit, Muriel,” my mom said.
    There’s a fountain in that final scene—so that Alma can give one of her sleeping pills to the young man, who washes the pill down by drinking from the fountain. There were originally benches in the scene, too, but Nils didn’t like the benches. (Muriel had been too agitated to sit still, given that I was staring at her breasts.)
    I foresaw a problem with losing the benches. When the young man hears that there’s a casino, which offers “all kinds of after-dark entertainment” (as Alma puts it), he says to Alma, “Then what in hell are we sitting here for?” But there were no benches; Alma and the young man couldn’t be
sitting
.
    When I pointed this out to Nils, I said: “Shouldn’t I say, ‘Then what in hell are we
doing here?
’ Because Alma and I
aren’t
sitting—there’s nothing to sit on.”
    “You’re not writing this play, Billy—it’s already written,” my mother (ever the prompter) told me.
    “So we bring the benches back,” Nils said tiredly. “You’ll have to sit
still
, Muriel. You’ve just absorbed a sleeping pill, remember?”
    “
Absorbed
!” Muriel exclaimed. “I should have
absorbed
a whole bottle of sleeping pills! I can’t possibly sit still with Billy staring at my breasts!”
    “Billy isn’t
interested
in breasts, Muriel!” my mother shouted. (This was not true, as I know you know—I simply wasn’t interested in
Muriel’s
breasts.)
    “I’m just
acting
—remember?” I said to Aunt Muriel and my mom.
    In the end, I leave the stage; I go off shouting for a taxi. Only Alma remains
—“she turns slowly about toward the audience with her hand still raised in a gesture of wonder and finality as … the curtain falls.”
    I hadn’t a clue as to how Muriel might bring that off—
“a gesture of wonder
” seemed utterly beyond her capabilities. As for the “
finality
” aspect, I had little doubt that my aunt Muriel could deliver finality.
    “Let’s one more time try it,” Nils Borkman implored us. (When our director was tired, his word order eluded him.)
    “Let’s try it one more time,” Grandpa Harry said helpfully, although Mrs. Winemiller isn’t in that final scene. (It is dusk in the park in
Summer and Smoke
; only Alma and the young traveling salesman are onstage.)
    “Behave yourself, Billy,” my mom said to me.
    “For the last time,” I told her, smiling as sweetly as I could—at both Muriel and my mother.
    “‘The water—is—cool,’” Muriel began.
    “‘Did you say something?’” I asked her breasts—as the stage direction says,
eagerly
.
    T HE F IRST S ISTER P LAYERS opened
Summer and Smoke
in our small community theater about a week after my Favorite River graduation. The academy students never saw the productions of our local amateur theatrical society; it didn’t matter that the boarders, Kittredge and Atkins among them, had left town.
    I spent the whole play backstage, until the twelfth and final scene. I was past caring about observing my mother’s disapproval of Grandpa Harry as